Because publishers demand to see the dinosaurs' feet. Dammit, they paid
for 'em!
Ha-ha, yes indeed. I've also had a publisher insist that I clear the ground
under my dinosaurs feet, and no matter what I said about ground cover the
reply was always "we wanna see the feet." I decided to keep the ground
cover and move the dino onto a muddy river bank... that way I got to paint
some tracks too! :0)
Worse than "we wanna see all the feet, ALL the time" is a publisher who
rejects a well researched preliminary drawing because it doesn't look like
their reference image, when their damn reference has been taken from a long
out of date book and/or was illustrated by an artist who did not do any
research. Often their un-researched reference was copied from another
un-researched reference and so on until we have the strange stereotypical
balloon dinosaurs in countless poor non-fiction children's books.
Publishers (non-specialised of course) find it quite unbelievable that I
work from fossils and refuse to work from other artists reconstructions.
Recently I had a lengthy discussions with a publisher over the size of the
feet on my drawing of Tyrannosaurus rex. I new I had it pretty close
because I had measured the feet of Stan, from the Black Hills Institute
mount at the University of Manchester Museum (UK), so I asked him to e-mail
his reference. Goodness me, you should have seen it! It was stood upright,
was pink, and looked so camp and had such large feet it was like Liberace
wearing oversized Barney the Dinosaur slippers!
"Big respect," as the kids say these days, to the artists on this list and
those others who fight their publishers to produce up to date artworks.
Dear Palaeontologists, we love doing our best for you.